Latest news with #DallowayDay
Hindustan Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Review: Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill
Dalloway Day, an annual event, was celebrated on June 11, marking the 100th anniversary, this year, of Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. Published by Hogarth Press, that the author set up with her husband Leonard in their basement at Hogarth House in Richmond, London, the novel challenged the Victorian idea of a plot. A luminary text, that has been adapted to films and plays, it is set to soon have its own biography published by Manchester University Press. But as everyone holds forth about the centenary – the book was published on May 14, 1925 though Dalloway Day celebrations are held in mid-June, when the central event of the novel, Mrs Dalloway's party, takes place – few question Woolf's colonial gaze. Indeed, the Eurasian character left in the margins has rarely been addressed. Far away from the colonial metropole, Daisy, Peter Walsh's Anglo-Indian lover awaits news from him in India. When Woolf mentions her in passing, it is with an air of racial superiority even as her protagonist, Clarissa, suffers from low self esteem. 'Oh if she [Mrs. Dalloway] could have had her life over again!...She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin like crumpled leather and beautiful eyes… slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere… She [Mrs Dalloway] had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them… this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.' The passage establishes Woolf's protagonist as someone without an inherent sense of self. In her fifties, when she is no longer pressed by the duties of being a wife and a mother, Clarissa Dalloway finds herself wanting to be more than her social identity as wife of a conservative MP with her silks and scissors preparing to throw a party on a fine evening in 1923. As she walks across London, she has opinions on everyone but it's not the same as participating in luncheons hosted by Mrs Bruton where they discuss politics. From Hugh Whitbread and Peter Walsh to Sally Seton and Miss Killman, everyone is scrutinised, even Septimus Smith's wife, Lucrezia, 'a little woman, with large eyes in sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.' Everyone, but not 53-year-old Peter Walsh's 24-year-old Anglo-Indian lover, Daisy, wife of a major, mother of two in India. She describes Indian women at large as 'silly, pretty, flimsy, nincompoops.' The stream of consciousness narrative, whose film parallel would ideally comprise one long single shot somehow narrated from the perspective of different characters, makes the reader wonder: Was Daisy merely a tool to explore the complex relationship that Peter and Clarissa shared in their youth? For Peter looks at Daisy as someone who'd boost his ego, '…of course, she would give him everything…everything he wanted!' which Clarissa had bruised. He describes, in his insecurity, the women he loved over the years as 'vulgar, trivial, commonplace' and has thought before that 'Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa.' Clarissa's presence in his life is further underlined by the impactful lines at the end of the text: 'It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.' The contemporary reader is bound to ask: With Clarissa's overbearing presence, what was Daisy doing in Peter's life? Compensating for the void left behind by Clarissa? When Woolf dug her characters from within, showcasing their perception of each other, why was Daisy left voiceless far away in India? Her mixed race mentioned but not explored. A century later, enter Michelle Cahill with Daisy & Woolf. An Australian of Anglo-Indian heritage, the author provides a glimpse of Daisy's life along with the difficulties and blockages that come with it by introducing a mixed-race immigrant protagonist, Mina, who is writing Daisy's story. Woolf is evoked in the novel's epigraph with a quote from A Room of One's Own: 'A woman writing thinks back through her mothers.' While the book revolves around motherhood quite a bit, the epigraph works like a double-edged sword: it showcases gratitude for the feminist writers who have paved the way for the telling of Daisy's story while also challenging their silence that has rendered voiceless this character at the margins. In this metafiction set in 2017, Cahill presents the dilemmas of race and migration through Mina's reimagination, in the novel that she is writing, of Daisy journeying to London to meet Peter Walsh. Mina writes, 'Muslims and refugees were being restricted by Trump's immigration ban; Theresa May was advocating an early Brexit deal, with Scotland calling for talks on a second referendum. All over the world people of colour felt vulnerable while crossing borders.' As the storyteller of Daisy's life, she narrates harrowing experiences of being Anglo-Indians from East Africa and of her brother's mental illness, a result of being bullied at school for being brown skinned. It's as if Mina, and Cahill herself, is attempting to fill an intersectional gap in the canon. Instead of writing a straight postcolonial response like Jean Rhys does for Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea, Cahill makes her work partly epistolary. Between Mina's meditation on racism and writing and her travels across India, China, London, and New York to find the nuances of Woolf's life, Daisy tells her story through letters and diary entries. Alongside, Mina writes, 'Mrs Woolf had kept Daisy stunted, and on purpose it seems. Her intent was always to centre Clarissa Dalloway, setting her in flight. Drifting and timeless, she is a hallmark achievement: Clarissa, the stream of Virginia Woolf's consciousness.' Daisy too addresses the absorbing nature of Clarissa's presence, which makes you wonder if she will ever see herself as Clarissa's equal or if she will succumb to class and racial hierarchies. She writes, '…although you [Walsh] hint at… an air of disappointment about Clarissa, it is impossible for me to imagine a woman more absorbing?' Cahill's Daisy has the decisive power to leave her husband and son behind to board a ship for London with her daughter and Radhika, a servant girl from Bihar. She reflects on her experiences as an Anglo-Indian in India by chronicling her life story and through the course of a journey lasting months from Calcutta to London, she comes face-to-face with the plague, loses her child to death, which changes her romantic obsession into something much stronger, a determination to chart out her life irrespective of Peter Walsh. She engages with the suffragettes, befriends Lucrezia — the other peripheral character in Mrs Dalloway — and makes a living in Italy, which can be interpreted as tragic for the former wife of an officer in the Indian army or as empowering for an immigrant woman in an alien land. Interestingly, Cahill leaves Daisy's servant girl behind. Radhika disappears, quite literally, from Daisy's life implying that not all stories can be accommodated when the writer chooses to focus on one character. However, this absence is observed and mourned by Daisy, who was held together by her support in the lowest times — a treatment that's better than Woolf's treatment of Daisy. Throughout the novel, Cahill keeps fictional characters and real-life figures in conversation with each other. Daisy & Woolf is meta not only for its story-within-a-story structure but also for the many references to Woolf's diaries and letters to interpret her psychology at the time. Daisy is also travelling to London at a time when Woolf is writing Mrs Dalloway. Characters from Woolf's story and suffragette figures such as Sylvia Pankhurst are masterfully incorporated into Daisy's narrative. All of it creates a dialogue between the worlds of Mina, Virginia and Daisy while also exploring grief, death, motherhood, alienation, sexuality and mental illness. The prose of both these novels is distinctive. But while Mrs Dalloway glides, Daisy & Woolf startles by intentionally hitting the brakes on multiple occasions. In the end, this novel, that breathes life into an incidental character, encourages readers to examine the colonial gaze of a celebrated 20th century high Modernist, while also realising that race, identity and migration are as fraught today as they ever were. Akankshya Abismruta is an independent writer.
New Statesman
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
We are all Mrs Dalloway now
Photo byEveryone has cracks; we hear that's how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted 'everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work'. In her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, published a century ago, she wanted 'all inner feelings to be lit up'. But so much light meant so many cracks. Virginia Woolf is now such a large figure in global literary culture that she has at least 15 full-length biographies. But Mark Hussey's new Mrs Dalloway is a biography of a novel by Woolf, relaying its conception, execution and propagation. Hussey is Professor of English at New York's Pace University, and we believe him when he tells us Woolf is 'my favourite writer': he has published several books on her, and includes a charmingly domestic photo of his personal Dalloway stash, piled 20 editions high, which he started over 50 years ago. By scholarship's best guess, Dalloway's scene – 'life; London; this moment of June' – is 11 June 1923. For the last eight years, with Woolf's reputation higher than ever, a 'Dalloway Day' has been celebrated, with tours of Woolf's London led by the Virginia Woolf Society. The festivities will be particularly exuberant this year, the centenary of Dalloway's publication. Walkers will see Bloomsbury and Westminster in all the 'absorbing, mysterious… infinite richness' Woolf imbued them with, 'as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious'. The amusements may sound little more than a short walk around central London. But so, really, might the book's plot. In the story, a politician's fashionable wife, Clarissa Dalloway, gives a fancy party, and a traumatised young veteran of the First World War, Septimus Warren Smith, kills himself after his doctors neglect him. Hussey is correct that, asked what the book is about, one might answer 'not much.' But, of course, for Woolf it was all about what was happening inside her characters. In that way she was of her modernist cohort, trying to find her artistic bearings after the moment 'on or about December 1910', as she put it, when 'human character changed'. To Woolf, to Joyce, to Proust, there had been what Hussey calls 'a fundamental shift in relations' between subject, object, and the nature of reality. What Woolf called Edwardian writing was futile just as describing a house's exterior was futile to convey the soul who slept inside. If art was to answer the 'astonishing disorder' of modernity, it had to directly penetrate conscious experience. It was an ambitious project, but Woolf felt confident. She had brought off two fairly conventional novels, and her more daring third, Jacob's Room, had attained wide praise. She felt she could write freely, and that she at last knew 'how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice'. Or, putting it another way, that she was 'beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain'. Her voice was her mental mechanism, however flawed that mechanism. Woolf had had to stay in a private nursing home after a severe breakdown that came a year after the marriage from which she wanted everything. A few months later, chance alone her saved her from death, after she took a deliberate overdose of Veronal (a sleeping aid). And two years after that she had suffered another severe breakdown. But with her confidence and reputation waxing, she felt 'madness is terrific… in its lava I find most of the things I write about'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Readers liked in her what she liked in those she read: what she called 'queer individuality'. So the project was to inspect her self as it shattered and reconstituted. No humans were 'as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes'. Instead they were 'splinters & mosaics', and art should show them as such. A plane broken to pieces and put together again became a mosaic, and thereby turned particular, beautiful, and more interestingly refractive. At one point in the novel, Clarissa Dalloway is seen mending her dress. To do full justice to her 'queer individuality', she devised for Mrs Dalloway a 'queer & masterful' design. For it, she had 'almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity.' So she devised Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, who would show 'the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side' and who, as in a long-held idea for a play, would only ever 'almost meet – only a door between – you see how they just miss – and go off at a tangent, and never come anywhere near again'. But they did come near again. The problem we all know, visible in the book and its author's life, is that the separation did not hold. Sanity went into insanity, life went into death. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse. Clarissa does not commit suicide, but was originally intended to, and it may be telling that one early reader mistakenly believed she had after finishing the book. Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, who fought to defend Shakespeare's England, does kill himself, and gives lie to the vision of art as individualisation. If the war launched Woolf's project, it also undermined it. Compare Woolf's artistic vision of splinters and mosaics, of lively Clarissa mending her dress, with her thoughts when visiting a relative, wounded during the First World War, in his hospital ward. She felt 'the uselessness of it all, breaking these people & mending them again'. It is hard to say what differentiates life-giving art from death-giving war. In one letter, Woolf described the War in artistic terms, as 'the preposterous masculine fiction'. Septimus is a traumatised veteran, but if any character has 'queer individuality' it is he. And he grows 'stranger and stranger', more and more alone, by allowing himself to think too much. The modernists thought leaving 'description' for 'insight' would help them ascertain truth; in fact it destroyed it. They were not writing, as they thought, after Einstein and Freud, but after their closer contemporary, Werner Heisenberg, the quantum physicist who found that electrons refused to be fixed under observation. So did the modern self, inspection only creating uncertainty. Woolf was closer than she knew on writing in her essay 'Modern Novels' that consciousness is an 'incessant shower of innumerable atoms'. The self-attention they hoped would achieve stability in fact wrecks it. The more you look, the less you know. Woolf's own metaphor was a 'tunnelling process', which allowed her to 'tunnel behind the façade of objective appearance' and reveal consciousness. But efforts to light up anything can only ever illuminate a new, deeper darkness. There is nothing at the back to reach. Clarissa feels 'the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone'. The best option might be to turn back while you still can. The generic life Woolf feared, inert and inartistic, 'mute & mitigated, in the suburbs,' may be preferable. Septimus loathes his boorish physician Dr Holmes, and Woolf loathed the psychiatrists she based him on. But it is hard to dismiss his insistence that introspection offers no delivery from itself, and his prescription that what Septimus really needs is to stop thinking about himself and become occupied by external things. To do so would certainly be to neglect his individuality, but the depths of his individuality killed him. Perhaps he should have joined the dull masses. The bores were right. In a preliminary, more frivolous appearance, the character of Clarissa Dalloway exclaimed, 'How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!' How much? Mrs Dalloway contains the birth and the doom of the modern self. We are all Virginia Woolf's children. She wanted light and was determined that it could be found somewhere at the back of the 'dark region of psychology'. She never found it, but we have continued her search. Her 'queer individuality' is a public deity. That the unexamined life is not worth living is a truth inviolable; indeed we examine relentlessly. It is almost axiomatic that inward tunnelling breaks through to rewarding clarity. But Mrs Dalloway is a warning as much as guide. Perhaps, for once, we need not go deeper. [See also: Who's offended by Virginia Woolf?] Related
